1983 - 1991
Adult education
West Mersea, Essex
A drive through unknown country,
where man and land meet sea and sky,
to an island adrift from the week.
Here I unpack my bag,
here I presume to speak
of that which needs no words of mine.
I speak of that which these lives speak,
these lives which bear the warp and weave
of poetry, my own as yet
a few poor broken unrhymed lines:
fragments of a song I cannot see or sing.
But here, in the drowse of spring sunshine,
something is given, something received,
cold learning meeting warm experience,
so that now, as I leave for the last time,
clutching this gift, kind words and memories,
I know that the truest poetry is in a life lived,
tokens of affection given,
like words on a page given,
into the silence of love.
All poetry points to this.
© Martin Robb 1983, 2012
Fragments in memoriam John Riley*
Days when time seems to stop, run slow.
A look at the clock: still half past nine.
A whole day, a lifetime ahead.
Out walking, one foot will go forward,
the other come after, move in that flow.
And how can you live,
your heart strung taut like a bow,
your brow two lines
that sharpen to a point?
And I said to my soul:
let there be a blurring of the vision,
a certain letting-go.
And all our knowledge is a tuning of the instrument,
a loosening of the string,
a little more pressure on the pedal:
the song: a thousand songs, the same song.
.
So we live: drawn to, drawn away from,
perpetual motion, a terror and love
of that which can save.
And all our life is a constant evasion,
perpetual flight from awareness.
The readied heart, the stilled mind
tremble on the verge of unutterable secrets:
all you ever wanted to know.
Then you reach for the radio,
or turn to stare out at a meaningless scene.
The moment and much more is lost.
.
Be suspicious of rhyme
the deception of language
a flight from truth
from the heart stripped bare
poetry as a way of finding
an utter honesty
beyond the deception of words
breaking down, breaking down,
losing, regaining faith
in the space between words
that which appears
is truth
© Martin Robb 1983, 2012
*John Riley (1937 - 1978) was a poet, author of the long poem 'Czargrad', and founder of the Grosseteste Press, who converted to the Orthodox Church. He was murdered near his home on the night of 27th/28th October 1978.
Easter Saturday
Easter Saturday: God in a tomb
and a gap in the world.
After the drama, the death on Skull Hill,
an ordinary Saturday. The shops are open,
there are trains and newspapers
and a let-up in the ritual.
But tomorrow it resumes,
just when the world had thought it was over:
not a thunderclap triumphant ending,
but an ordinary scene in a garden, with women.
And all of a sudden everything is different,
all our plans for this Easter awry.
Cancel the holiday, the trip to the coast,
to get away from it all, from the cross and the crowds.
Ring round the dispersed disciples,
some returned to their work,
others sleeping it off, still others,
two by two, on a road out of town
(but they know already).
Come back to the centre
from which, we thought,
the heart had gone out.
Come back to see – what?
an emptiness, a shifted rock?
Come back to hear – what?
the stories of women, hysterical with grief?
Come back for a few brief moments
in a room, on a beach, at an inn.
Then silence.
But if anything comes out of it all
(this was Peter speaking, one night, some weeks later),
these rumours, these glimpses
will serve to remind us
that there is no going back
to the way things once were,
that we cannot return
to the old work, the old ways,
that something is different:
that whatever else happens
we must live with this absence
and this aching gap inside me
in future will be what I live from
this absence my hope
this weakness my strength
his death my resurrection
somehow, somewhere unknown.
© Martin Robb 1984, 2012
A Greek fragment
Aegina, 1986
Early morning, and I wake from the dreams
that all year have lain hidden in my breast.
Liberated by rest, by this island, they rise
by night and work out their knotted dramas.
So that slowly I wake, a blank slate,
washed by the sea, dried by the sun,
refreshed by the wind that blows around this bay,
made new by mountains, temples, pinewoods
and endless summer sky.
So as the sun rises on another island day,
and you lie curled on the bed beside me,
taps begin to run, floors creak, generators hum,
voices echo on floors and in corridors:
the world comes alive
beneath the woods of Artemis.
in the shadow of the temple of Afaia,
in the blue Saronic sea,
surrounded by Athens, Mycenae, Corinth,
the original impulse of our foundering civilization.
In the simple things we find life
and a new beginning.
Yesterday the village sang beneath the sun:
the red geraniums at every roadside,
the call of friends, the laughter of lovers,
the caw of the cormorant, the squawk of chickens,
the early sunlit rumble of work and things to be done,
the thrum and klung of music in doorways,
the cheeping of birds and the smell of green trees,
of pine and lemon, olive and pistachio.
Each day returning, relentless, unbidden,
is given, a gift, a benison, a blessing.
And as my soul awakens, opens its eyes
to this new day, new breath of being
from the earth, from the most high,
from my soul arms stretch out,
armies march out to meet, to mingle with
the smile of the sun, the embrace of the earth,
intercourse of the air, of the sky seeping through me,
breathing life into me.
I will not keep them out, nor lock the door
against life this morning: I will
lift up my head, my heart to the wonder,
to the great world, thick now with activity,
with work, a thousand daily tasks
that compose this skein of being-in-the-world.
May I plunge, as into a pool,
as an explorer into forests,
as an initiate into baptism,
as a martyr to the flames,
into this day.
May my skin burn
with the naked heat of pure life,
untrammelled by otherworldly wonderings.
May soul and body both be present here,
both, as one being, be alive in this day.
May no division cleave them,
no theory come between them,
to turn them against each other,
and each against the world.
The love of the world is given, a gift,
cannot be seized or struggled for, like a belief,
will come, like the first sun of summer,
in the morning, by surprise,
will come again and again,
if you are willing,
if your soul is ever-young.
All you can do is clear the ground,
clean off the dross of world-hatred,
sweep away suspicion, self-enclosure:
learn to sing the song of the earth,
learn to love the small things for themselves,
learn to be at peace with the promptings
of your own heart, however strange,
and let your heart go out to meet the yearnings
of other hearts, in solidarity.
Somewhere, hours away, a city is waking:
familiar city, strength of thousands.
People are plunging into crowds
underground, over rivers,
a great web of movement,
a dance of new being,
swimming together in the sea of the city.
© Martin Robb 1986, 2012
Fragments towards a common song
St Mary’s Old Church, Stoke Newington
Here on the hill above London,
you can see the city’s glassy tower
rising out of the river valley.
Here, next to the park
with its manor house falling down,
here in a tiny graveyard
‘the Ancient Mother Church’.
How did the ancient mother
give way to the glassy tower?
Or was the world of the tower nurtured
in the ancient mother’s womb?
There is no escape from the influence
of the all-seeing glassy tower,
its eye enfolds in its gaze
these crumbling streets
where, out of the ruins of hope,
we attempt to claim back some brightness,
some sign of life, to defy the proud tower
which on every side seduces us,
its glittering false index of need
imposed on us like an occupation.
Interregnum
How difficult the way is and how slow.
All around, struggle and movement,
the sense of a world labouring to be born.
This fragile, sometimes beautiful world
is built across a ruined bridge of dreams,
the ruins of our fathers’ and their fathers’ dreams.
Armies of men, cities of women fought for,
denied victory, without know what they forfeited.
So while the flowers die as soon as they are born,
and each new birth is a prelude to early death,
and nothing grows any more to its full height,
in isolated pockets of resistance the silent struggles go on,
broken-backed, failing to come to fruition,
for want of a common song.
For all our songs have twisted words
and our dreams are infiltrated
by strangers with mechanical vision,
and our hearts are sold into a slavery
in which we are deceived that we are free,
and freedom has become the mere fear of slavery.
Our solidarity we have exchanged
for cheap dreams of private pleasure,
our eyes transfixed by the starlight of solitary success:
frenetic scramble to conserve and construct monuments
to the already-dead, or resurrect the corpses
of played-out years. Nostalgic for nostalgia:
the icing on a cake of worms.
Nowadays
Nowadays we like a countryside without people:
we have fallen out of love with our own kind,
forgetting that a land, if it is really a land,
and not a formless wilderness, outside meaning and time,
is made by a people’s living love and struggle.
Nowadays we like everything to be worn and unchanging,
forgetting the change upon change that made even
the most familiar things what they are.
Nowadays we do not like history,
only stories that remind us of how great we once were
and how, once upon a time, there was a garden
in which everything was lovely,
in a time that no one can really remember,
before the War, before the Fall.
And we all succumb to the strains
of an England that never was,
forgetting the gains and the losses,
the minor victories and greater defeats.
Manifesto (in memoriam Victor Jara)*
When I write I want to write
of the struggles of people, alone and together,
for happiness, for a living, for a place to call home.
I want to piece together, like a building,
all of the myriad silent lives:
my father and mother, our friends, my brothers,
their lives strung out through the century like stars.
I could wish that my poem might be their constellation,
my building their meaning, in this age without meaning.
I want to write of my own small struggle
for a path, for a place in this muddle we call history,
now that at least I feel part of history.
The crime of our time is the hiddenness of history,
the sense that each one suffers alone.
In silence this conspiracy is imposed by those
who secretly know that history has always been on their side,
but now is slowly eroding their maniac grip on things.
They are scared that, one day, we shall see ourselves
in the mirror of history and wish, at last, truly to live.
When I write I want to write
in lines smooth and long, like speech, like song,
in lines understood by children, by lovers,
in lines that are born of the earth and of now,
but rise on wings above earth, beyond now:
a poetry that is the song of the earth.
A poetry from which these few poor lines as far
as the new-born cygnet is from the winged swan.
© Martin Robb 1985, 2012
*Victor Jara (1932 - 1973) was a Chilean singer, songwriter and political activist. He was arrested, tortured and murdered in the aftermath of the coup of 11th September 1973.
In memoriam Yannis Ritsos: for the communist dead*
Ritsos is dead and Europe is silent.
In Greece a man dies in exile at home,
lamenting the end of a nightmare he fought for.
In their graves the colonels stop turning,
at peace at last, their torment ended,
as is our own half-century-long exposure
to the nagging reminder
that we have set aside the dreams of our youth.
The silent witness is silent forever,
no longer out of sight on an island,
but obliterated, gone with Eluard, Neruda,
their dreams betrayed by those
with no poetry in their own souls,
whose dreams were the same in name only,
who twisted words they carved in love
to loveless ends.
(All over Europe the tide goes out,
its effluence of forty years piled up
on the shores of our longing.)
And their voices cannot be heard,
because the hope of their lives
has been betrayed by those
who do not have even half the love
they had, even if in the end
we decide they were wrong to put their trust
in the steel-hearted butcher of their hopes
and could not see past him
to the ground of their dreaming.
Dear Yannis, elliptical of late,
I mourn your withdrawal from the long flowing lines,
the rivers of love, blood, flags and crowds
of those early years, when passion flowed
from your songs to the streets of Greece,
and every new rising was swept up in your words
and sung across squares to glorious music,
ringing through defeat and through exile,
ringing down through the years
when the world conspired to impose on Greece
a junta of injustice, rather than risk
the coming time of the hopes of many.
Who will replace you? Across Europe
the shutters are down, the windows sealed
against any intrusion of the wild wind of hope.
We’re supposed to be ‘post’ all that.
Your lot were the last, the terminus of all hopes.
How smoothly the logothetes rule out our dreams
and cancel our emancipation with a stroke of fashion.
The collapse of your friends beyond the Curtain,
for all their admitted perversion of the idea,
is somehow supposed to mark the end of all vision.
You die heartbroken,
but your lifelong epic of resistance,
your elongated tragedy of song,
will not be forgotten,
cannot be buried with you,
and the mountains and the groves and the blue Aegean,
and the warm wind whipping round Samos harbour,
will echo with your music forever.
Must the end of a nightmare
be the death of all dreaming?
© 1991, 2012
*Yannis Ritsos (1909 - 1990) was a Greek poet and political activist, whose poem 'Epitaphios' was set to music by Mikis Theodorakis and became the anthem of the Greek Left. Under the Papadopoulos dictatorship Ritsos was sent into internal exile on the island of Gyaros.
Pentecost poems
In the middle of life, the middle of England,
you climb to a peak, look over the hill.
Inside your soul is still young,
no wrinkles or signs of age, just
the gentle ripening of the fruit
that emerged years ago
at the end of an endless branch
stretching back to history and God.
How to come to terms with the face in the mirror,
when you feel as you have always felt,
a young and green shoot out alone in the world,
longing at times for the shelter
of the endless life that you came from?
In the middle of life the heart wonders,
bewildered, where it should have got to by now,
and where in fact it is, and what lies
far off there, across the plain,
beyond the conquered hill.
.
These mornings are like September, early:
the fresh snap, the grass white with sunlight.
Then the day opens up, like the hawthorn,
to this long, lost-in-summer feel.
That the promise of my birth could be fulfilled,
Galilee become Jerusalem, become
the risen life of a lakeside,
those days of supernatural communion,
bread and wine and friends by a lakeside.
Life must move on from the carpenter’s cottage:
the return home with white robes and a look
of what you have been through can only come
after death and disappointment,
the long search up the path to a hard hill.
Here we are, in the time after Easter,
the earth fecund with white and green
and smelling of life, bitter-sweet, overwhelming.
Only the long-dead could resist life this morning.
In the time before Whitsun: next week
the white spirit, like desire but cooler, descends.
We shall speak in other tongues to each other,
to the nations. What does it mean,
now the bread-and-wine god is gone?
Can we live in the white cool spirit
in dark rooms forever, or shall we find once more
the lakeside lord, laughing among us?
As the sunlight settles over full green fields,
is he here, can we taste him,
in the sap of me rising to the creation of daytime,
in the anxious searching to know, to uncover,
in the painful scrawl, the never-right combination
of word-shapes? In the stillness before this day
is he here among us still:
does the white lord return incarnate in the green world?
.
No longer Pentecost but bank holiday:
the money-world closed and we have forgotten
whether it is this weekend or next
the white spirit whispered through a shut room.
And is something changed on the earth
since bread and wine became him
and fishermen spoke in tongues of angels?
Something is different, somewhere the god:
the lifelong quest is where and forever
uncovering each day the hidden risen one.
And how it could be if the vision were true,
my life a gentle transformation,
this sun now shining a token,
the earth a sacrament,
all things a sign.
The sceptic writes this and the seeker
in dark places, the wanderer on footpaths,
explorer of woods and grassy banks,
the watcher of skies and the auditor of birdsong,
carefully to catch somewhere sudden breath
of his advent, late among us.
The body is tired and racked
by the struggles of the world,
but the spirit is a dell
where sunlight plays through leaves
high up, as a waterfall splashes
into a winking stream,
and only the birdsong, occasional, accompanies
in silent music the sound of the soul.
We have lost it, locked up:
this upper room recaptures for history
the waterfall and the sunlight,
forever now, forever future.
.
I remember rising at dawn with the monks,
white air over fields and a soul-dark chapel
in the deepest green of the Leicestershire countryside.
White cowls and stone walls
and the cold beauty of plainchant at five in the morning,
my body freezing before its first mug of tea.
I remember rising at camp before others,
my twelve-years-ago self in the middle of my questing,
and walking off into corners of fields
in the white dawn, plimsolls on wet grass,
while damp canvas covered boys’ dreams
and mist hung on tent poles.
I remember a dull room in a dark tower,
closed in and confined,
looking out on the raw red sky,
the lager factory and the egg-box ghettoes,
reading a green book with white pages,
the regular words out of psalms of ages,
waking me, putting me to rest
with the routine of centuries.
Somewhere still monks are rising
and other souls walking in white fields,
tossing in dull rooms, their lives
parceled out by eternal words.
Here I am, years later, wandering.
.
The day of my birth: relieved I arrive,
living after you I rise.
To have lived longer than you,
your thirty-three years, by a day.
I walk into this day as across a new field
unknowing: fresh grass waves in the breeze
of silent music, like a Tarkovsky opening.
Distracted by music I move
to the heart of desire,
the incandescent quavering image,
the breath of this morning.
And I am thirty-four years old.
Today, after so long
it can only be resurrection,
not a mere accumulation of years,
but a burning journey that has taken
a new turn towards eternity
and fills its awed silence
with these early words: a beginning.
.
Whitsunday: rain falls,
drawing warmth from the earth,
and memory a turning in,
the green no longer flash with life
but thoughtful, wondering,
at the heart of the wet world.
On Sunday we learn
to accommodate ourselves to ourselves,
rising from the sluggishness of Saturday night,
wine and music and nothing-doing
to the white air of a Sunday
and the fresh wind of a new beginning.
I drive back in the June shower
from the video shop, past the petrol station,
listening to The Archers, see
the scrubbed kids and flower-dressed women
march from cars up grave-lined paths
to an incensed church where bells announce
transfiguration of the week
in the holy moment, away from it all.
While outside in the rain
Spar and Do-It-All are car-crowded,
there’s a boot sale on and a queue for the tip.
And I am left wondering about a longed-for god,
far gone from his incensed bounds,
sprung from that spired prison,
but lost on the moor of my wandering soul.
Lingering at lych-gate, shy slipping into back pew,
secret flicking through a green book and white words,
looking for a lost god and a lost time
in the rain this Sunday morning.
© Martin Robb 1990, 2012